Client Management Suite

Hello, I am very new to Altiris and getting my feet wet but had a question on expiring patches, to see if this can be done.

So let's say you approve patches and they are distributed out to the package server at the intended sites and everything works successfully.  After say 4 months, if the filter does not pick up any workstation/servers that need a certain patch, can it be expired and content deleted at that site package server, but then if a machine that doesn't have the patch gets turned on, can it pull it from the main site, without having to push it back out the the site it's on?

I hope this isn't clear as mud and I appreaciate any help and insight.

Hi  Jpreuss,

Most of what you have mentioned is how Altiris works out of the box.

Within the console, these settings can be found at:

Click Settings > All Settings

Expand Software, Patch Management, Windows Settings and click on Windows Patch Remediation Settings.

Within the Packages Tab, the Package Defaults will show the Delete Packages After time - I believe by default this is 1 week.

Once the Policy for the patch has done all of it's work and has delivered to all the machines, the policy will remain active by default to catch any new machines that enter your environment, however the package will be deleted from the Site Server after the Delete Packages After time. 


 

Forgot to mention the client - by default the client will delete the package after 1 week also - unless you use Peer to Peer which is available in 7.6 HF7, 8.0 and 8.1. This is not enabled by default, so you would know if you enabled it.

You can see this within the software package for the patch - in package tab for the patch package, the "Package files will be deleted from the client computer if unused for" setting will be 1 week by default. 

Let me know if you have any further questions, thanks.